


Same Old Song at the Moon

by crowroad



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brotherly Love, Childhood Memories, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, Fairy Tale Elements, Kansas, Love, Obsessive Dean Winchester, Protective Dean Winchester, Werewolves, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-03
Updated: 2015-04-03
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:52:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3635622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kansas, werewolves, grandmothers, memories, hearts, axes, fierce messed-up tangled-up brotherly love.</p>
<p>Or: You can gank the were, but you can't kill the wolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Same Old Song at the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> title from [Carol Ann Duffy, "Little Red-Cap".](http://thepoemoftheweek.blogspot.com/2006/01/poem-of-week-1162006-little-red-cap.html)

 

 

Sometimes they're wolves. Not really wolves. But like wolves, black-ruffed and silver-tipped, howling at the phases, the mesas, the road, themselves; only there's no pack. There's a pack of two. That's all there's ever been.

*****

They're denned up in a foreclosed bone-white ranch in central Kansas when Dean drops a palmload of bullets on the table and says, “What the eff with werewolves, man?”

“What do you mean?” Sam says, takes a sip of some kind of nut-milk algae thing; no mistaking that for blood.

“I mean…” It’s not that words fail, but sometimes a growl is simpler.

“The monster in all of us, you know,” Sam says, about two-thirds ironically, because _of course._

“This one likes grandmas,”Dean says,“and granddaughters.”

Sam raises his eyebrows, doesn’t say _, just like you._

The moon’s two days from full.

**_*_ **

What’s it like to turn, he wants to know, though he does, sort of, has lived in, been lived in by, so many shadows, caves, ribcages, sewers, cellars, holes, all the dark places other people hang the Keep Out sign for, and mean it.

Sometimes in the nightmares, not the ones that taste of whiskey but the others, there’ll be a body, meaty, and there they'll be, shoulder-to-shoulder and bloody-muzzled, tearing at the bones.

*****

In the morning he goes for coffee, checks out the heavy sky, forgets there’s no hot water, no water at all, uses up the last of the toothpaste dry-brushing, pokes Sam not-gently in the second rib.

“Bite me,” Sam says, sleep-laughs like the tickled kid he once was.

“Yeah, think there’s enough of that going on around here already.”

Sammy makes a sound, turns over like he’s shaking off a dream.

“What's it like,” Dean asked him once, halfway to wasted, “to have sex with a werewolf?”

Sam hit him with a rolled-up _Examiner-Gazette_ and then got all paw-licking, broody, and he never asked again. 

*****

“Dear god,” says the grandmother in Salina.

“Nope,” says the werewolf, eats her ribs first.

They chase it down a drive to a stand of cottonwood, and it gets Sam on his back, snapping, and Dean remembers.

His brother laid out, dead for the first time at twenty-three, not the last.

The way something, sounds, yips and barks, wanted out, something greater in his gut, a broken-ribbed open-throated moan, all the way down to the crossroads.

Sammy pushes the thing off and Dean puts its lights out, climbs over rank-hair-gone-flesh-of-a-farmer to lick his brother’s face-- not really-- but to scrape off the worst of the slobber, laugh like it's nothing, pull him up out of the dirt and the dark.

Look for bites by streetlight, by flashlight, by all sixteen senses.

Burn the bitten farmer, in a fallow field.

*****

“You're fucked,” a black-haired bartender told him once. Her bedroom had a half-moon on the ceiling. Her bra was red.

“Hope so,” he said, put a hand in a strategic place.

“No,” she said; not pissed, patient, “not like that.”

“Why’m I fucked, then?”

“Because you're in love with your own blood.”

“What?”

“I've got a gift,” she said.

“For what?”

“Complicated bonds between conspecifics. I can smell them.”

“Huh?”

She tapped her nose, her temple, touched his lips, sent him home happy, but full of teeth, bared.

*****

Thing is, the first one he hunted left a scar, shape of a question mark.

Thing is, dad said, “werewolves, man, never let your guard down,” shuddered like they were demons.

Thing is Sammy still dreams about the one near Flint, summer he was twelve, that cornered them in a closet, dripped something fierce over their shaking arms.

Thing is, a lone wolf, any kind at all, is dead.

*****

The granddaughter is Rose, is fox-haired, bespectacled, stoic, spares a mouth-twitch for Sam’s consoling hand.

“She was everything to me,” she says, “raised me since my parents died, sent me off into the world with…”

“Everything you needed,” Sam says, lets Dean shuffle.

“I know it wasn’t a wild dog,” Rose says, “I’m a grad student in evolutionary biology at Kansas State.”

“Oh,” Sam says.

“Who are you then, the huntsmen?” 

“Um,” says Sam, "something like that."

“I’ve read the stories too,” she says, flashes them a toothed tattoo, leaves them leaning torn-up on the car, goes books-over-arm to bury her blood in breadbasket earth and a heap of red roses.

Doesn’t see the axes, so to speak, in the trunk.

Or maybe she does, because she turns, tips them a wink, whispers, _any chance you could leave some of those with me, in case his pack comes back._

*****

_No,_ Dean thinks, _no, no, no_ , pushes Sam into shotgun, turns the key, opens her up into an interstate lope.

_We’re the wolves._

What’d I tell you, John said _,_ when he pulled them from that Michigan closet, kicked the monster from the door _, what did I tell you?_

Sorry sir, he said, hand flat to the hammer in Sammy’s ribs; later caught him sketching, two pointy-eared pups in a cupboard, bright red spatter, writing a story to go with, the word “trap” in the title.

Didn’t have the heart to tell him to not to.

*****

So they kill it.

They drive away across the flat earth of their home state with bloody shirts, blood in their hair, brambles in their hands, bark stuck in their backs.

They put down the windows and let the wind stretch its legs, let their tongues hang out and their hackles settle and the moon shine down like a blessing, a curse.

*****

“Thanks for having my back,” Sam says, somewhere north of Aurora, leaves a bloodstain when he lifts the keys from Dean’s palm, doesn’t pick up the sick thump of his pulse:  _always, what if, always, what if._

“It’s a hell of thing,” Eastwood says on motel cable just over the Nebraska line, “killing a man. Take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”

Dean listens to Sam sleep-grumbling in a bundle of sheets, thinks, _I'd die for you_ isn’t the same as _I love you with everything I got._

And all the things that I don't.

*****

They get on down the shadow-brindled road, but he wonders.

Sam looks at him wild and how many deaths can you die.

Sometimes he could lay himself out, belly up, just breathing.

Sometimes he could sit right down and eat a heart.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Eastwood dialogue is from [Unforgiven.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zKCIf-vfbc)
> 
> The heart, poor fellow,  
> pounding on his little tin drum  
> with a faint death beat…—Anne Sexton, “Red Riding Hood”


End file.
